Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Sunday, December 28, 2008

And with that, it's my turn to head out of town. Might post something later in the week, or possibly not until next weekend. Ahab, you're on your own until Tom comes back. If you decide to have a party, please clean up afterwards.

Arbat Street is the main tourist/shopping street in Moscow. It's not exactly Fisherman's Wharf tacky, but it comes close in some ways. It also has no small amount of charm and mystery, as most any street in any foreign country will to someone who is visiting for the first time.

Speaking of Xmas parties, Saturday night I had yet another painful lesson in why I should always bring my camera with me.

I was on my way to the company Christmas party, about a block from home, when I realized I hadn't brought my camera. I waffled for a minute and then decided not to go back for it--probably not much to shoot at the party, and I would feel kind of like a dork with my camera slung over my shoulder the whole evening.

I caught a 5 Fulton right away and got downtown with some time to kill, so I figured I'd wander around Westfield Mall. As I was walking in through the BART entrance, I passed a half-dozen people dressed as Santa Claus. Inside there were more of them. Santa in a rainbow clown wig. Santa in a bodice. Devil Santa. At one point a group took the escalator down a floor, an entire escalator-riser's worth of Santas. And outside, at the cable car turnaround, there were hundreds of them.

Yes, it was SantaCon. And me without my camera. Let that be a lesson to me.

Monday, December 15, 2008

My company Christmas party was at the Giants' ballpark last Saturday night. It was pretty fun. For convenience's sake, I only took my little camera with me, and was not very happy with most of the pictures I took. This one turned out okay, though.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

I'm adding this mainly as an example to ahab of what can be done with various online imaging programs. I used Preview to desaturate this without turning it completely black and white; I considered going the other way, and really bringing the colors of the county fair way, way up, but eventually decided that I liked this very subtle, almost-black and white/almost-pastel image better than any other view of this shot I tried. To me, it looks sort of like an old hand-colored image that you might find in a vintage postcard shop.

This is also an example of how I post-process my pictures. This shot was taken in color, with lots of bright reds and yellows against a deep blue sky background. I often experiment with saturation levels, contrast, exposure, brightness, gamma, temperature, sharpness and other options before deciding on the final "face" I'm going to present to the world. On occasion, I'll create two or even three different versions of the same photograph to post at Flickr or wherever. Whatever the final outcome, though, the real fun is always in the experimenting, in seeing what the possibilities are, and where I can go in different directions with any given image. There are lots of photo manipulating programs out there, and my guess is that most of them are probably better than Preview, which is pretty basic. But even with a simple application like that, anyone can make a few manipulations with a just a couple keystrokes and turn a mediocre picture into a decent or even very good picture.

Of course, as I remember saying to Tom and his brother Steve about a year ago, all the manipulation in the world won't rescue a bad picture or put a good image in your camera. With all due humility, if you don't have an eye for framing and composition, if you don't bring something halfway decent to the table to begin with, no photo imaging program in the world will turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.

(I'm trying desperately to resist the urge to use a "you can put all the lipstick you want on Sarah Palin, but she'll still never be a viable candidate" metaphor, but obviously my will is weak. Anyway, I think you get my drift.)

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Managua was a donut city when I was there. The 1972 earthquake obliterated the downtown area, and it was never rebuilt--Wikipedia says "out of fear of earthquakes", but the story I heard was that Somoza's family owned a bunch of land on the outskirts and got a bill passed prohibiting rebuilding in the center.